I’ve been asking for help understanding Donald Phelps’s essay on Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss. Basically, I’d like to read a plain-English version of what he’s saying. A one-paragraph summary would be fine, two paragraphs if that’s what it takes, or whatever you think is right. Or a full-text rendition, of course. Or nothing, since people have things to do besides helping me out.
Anyway, in the last post’s comments Layla tackles the question of aggressive/competitive strangeness. She suggests that Mr. Phelps has in mind “strangeness that is ‘edgy,’ which is more aggressive and in your face and which is viewed (at least today) as positive.” So, by Layla’s reading, we’re talking about edginess vs. quaintness, with quaintness now being outmoded and in low repute, and with the essential difference between the two being that “edginess” is aggressive toward the audience.
Layla, thanks for the hand, I hope I got what you’re saying.
For her, or anyone who feels like it, a few follow-ups:
1) how is edginess aggressive toward the audience?
2) how is edginess “competitive”? is the idea that edgy output is always trying to top other edgy product, trying to seem stranger?
3) if that is the idea, does it seem plausible to people that quaint product isn’t trying to out-strange other quaint product?
4) if that isn’t the idea, what is?
Semi-long executive summary: “Form entails a sense of the imagination’s geography and its component laws.” Seuss breaks those laws; Sendak doesn’t.
For Phelps, form is art; specifically, it’s the form embodied in any individual work of art. He calls it “judicious awareness of locality.” The best example’s when he talks about the frame– he notes how Seuss, who mostly ditches form, couldn’t contain his craziness in comic-strip panels.
Other forms: in Sendak it’s the fable; in Laurel and Hardy, vaudeville. The Marx Brothers’ late works violated the vaudeville form that defined them; Seuss likewise failed for abandoning the integrity of his stories in favor of commodity. Phelps faults him for ditching the terms of the story for an awareness of the audience as consumers. That’s why he starts with the memory of the bug spray ad and faults late Seuss’ sermons in the text.
The quaint/cozy opening sets up the tone of reminisce– this one’s more prosaic than usual– and contrasts modern consumer tastes with gentler, older tastes. (Seuss is more revered by modern taste than Sendak, so Phelps backs into it a little.) It also implies the quietness in Sendak that’s missing in Seuss’ “Mardi Gras.” Finally, Phelps links Seuss’ source in the nightmare visions of the Victorian era; but Seuss made them “amicable nightmares,” and Phelps implies that he did so because he realized they were quite marketable.
(And every time I flip through to the Phelps essay, I get that page with banausoi, douloi, gnosis, noesis, aristoi, and saeculum all distractingly italicized, and I have to laugh.)
Yeah, that’s more or less what I got. And, as I said, I think the formal claims are kind of nonsense, and the real issue is the commercialism/bourgeois accusation. It’s a high-art/low-art distinction tarted up to disguise its obvious silliness. Or so I claim, anyway….
1) how is edginess aggressive toward the audience?
Well, “edginess” means that the creator is working at or beyond the boundaries of conventions: it’s a challenge to the audience’s expectations. Challenge is aggressive.
2) how is edginess “competitive”? is the idea that edgy output is always trying to top other edgy product, trying to seem stranger?
Edginess is competetive in that, in any dynamic, living genre, the boundaries of the conventions are always moving. Whether or not one creator is consciously trying to top other creator’s edginess is irrelevant.
3) if that is the idea, does it seem plausible to people that quaint product isn’t trying to out-strange other quaint product?
I think it’s possible that you might be trying to “out-quaint” some other work (like in a gingerbread house-making contest), but I don’t think it’s inherent in the “doing quaint” in the way it is in “doing edgy”. Partly because I don’t think we process edgy and quaint in the same way.